In this dream I was again standing on the stage of the Opera House in
San Francisco, ready to lecture, and with the audience vividly
individualized before me in the strong light. I begun, spoke a few
words, and stopped, cold with fright; for I discovered that I had no
subject, no text, nothing to talk about. I choked for a while, then got
out a few words, a lame, poor attempt at humor. The house made no
response. There was a miserable pause, then another attempt, and another
failure. There were a few scornful laughs; otherwise the house was
silent, unsmilingly austere, deeply offended. I was consuming with
shame. In my distress I tried to work upon its pity. I began to make
servile apologies, mixed with gross and ill-timed flatteries, and to beg
and plead for forgiveness; this was too much, and the people broke into
insulting cries, whistlings, hootings, and cat-calls, and in the midst
of this they rose and began to struggle in a confused mass toward the
door. I stood dazed and helpless, looking out over this spectacle, and
thinking how everybody would be talking about it next day, and I could
not show myself in the streets. When the house was become wholly empty
and still, I sat down on the only chair that was on the stage and bent
my head down on the reading-desk to shut out the look of that place.

August 27, 2012

Ceci's star ascendant, unbound by celestial strata, whether she's kicking it from the Salzburger Festspiele admin offices as the newly-minted artistic director or kicking it from the stage in Haendel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto.

This past May (and reprised this August) Ceci is/was Cleopatra in Haendel's aforementioned jam, joined by Andreas Scholl's Cesare, Anne Soffie von Otter's Cornelia and Philippe Jaroussky's Sesto. For those of us who couldn't be in Salzburg to snap the Salzach from the Sacher's suite balconies or to brunch on Irischer Räucherlachs at Demel, an intrepid hero has uploaded the Haendel masterpiece onto the 'tubes.

The third annual Run for Rachmaninoff bolts on Saturday, September 8, at 9 a.m. with Dutch artist Guido van der Werve leading a thirty-mile race from his Luhring Augustine gallery in Bushwick to the grave of Rachmaninoff in Valhalla, N.Y.

Van der Werve commented to a participant of last year's run that he organized the race because the Russian composer's body seemed "kind of lonely there".

August 22, 2012

Tonight, partly mid-air, The Birmingham Opera Company stages its premiere of Stockhausen’s complex Mittwoch Aus Licht in full version. The grueling six hour opera will feature a string quartet performing in four helicopters as part of the Helicopter String Quartet, dreamt up (literally) by relentless opera visionary Graham Vick for his unorthodox, 25-year-old opera company.

The always inspiring Vick elaborated:

“Stockhausen’s imagination doesn’t belong in opera houses. The whole idea of a soundscape is freed up if you create a space where audiences and performers intermingle. At its purest, directing operas is about creating a context and opening out receptivity. And that is what is at the middle of this whole opera: how you receive sound.”

August 19, 2012

Written in blood on OC's 13-year-old crush roll, former 'N SYNC star Justin Timberlake's poised to reinvent himself with opera. This month's Star magazine reports that JT's booked a vocal coach to authenticate an opera-inspired track on his next album. Hopefully it will lead to a Motherlover/Dick in a Box operetta.

August 09, 2012

Principal ballerina of the San Francisco Ballet Yuan Yuan Tan has been cast in a new role and it's not onstage. The Shanghai-born ballerina appears in the newly-released Gap fall campaign (above) among up-and-coming musicians and dancers.Tan, principal at the SFB since 1997, is also a brand ambassador for Van Cleef & Arpels and Rolex. Let's take a moment to remeber that Gap ad from 2007 with Roberto Bolle (and Greta Hodgkinson of the National Ballet of Canada).

August 07, 2012

Santa Fe recently debuted Philip Gossett's new critical edition/world premiere of Maometto II in a new production by David Alden. The world's greatest Italian opera scholar schooled the Santa Fe Opera -- including bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni as the lead and soprano Leah Crocetto as Anna -- on Rossini's 1820 tale of a Turkish sultan's siege of the Venetian colony Negroponte, full of slaughter, suicide and everything in between.

August 04, 2012

Just when you thought that the Russian diva had nothing else to share, Netrebko aired out her couture (Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace) in a seasonal show-and-tell for June's edition of Tatler Russia. Technicolor-dyed furs, exaggerated bling and bold prints, there's just one word for it. Ooooo that was way harsh, Tai.

August 03, 2012

Chris Marker, the maestro of cinema who passed away on July 30 at the age of 91, spent his long, extraordinary life illuminating ours. He demonstrated once and for all that time, like Dante's hell, is circular (in "La Jetée"). He was the man who taught us that what is actual is actual only for one time (in "Sans Soleil").

Damiano Michieletto's just-unwrapped, modern La bohème production for Salzburg, which opened a few days ago starring Trebs in the title role, won over the audience and critics alike -- twelve minutes of applause for the 37-year-old Venetian's "dark" interpretation, set in a mall, Mimi as a lost soul with the young bohemian posse on self-destruct mode.

Michieletto tells Corriere della Sera that he started working in opera out of boredom. His blue collar parents -- a soccer mom and a working-class dad -- never took him to the opera. A nice comeback for a festival that hasn't put into scene an Italian director in 13 years. The man of the hour, tower of power.

He laments that Italian directors aren't noted abroad. For his Bohème, he sought a balance between telling the story without boredom and banishing cliche.